


Recognition

by kindkit



Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Age Difference, Ficlet, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-12
Updated: 2010-09-12
Packaged: 2017-10-11 16:31:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/114394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindkit/pseuds/kindkit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The art of seeing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recognition

**Author's Note:**

> Set after "The Mind Robber," during which the Doctor has to reconstruct Jamie's face from memory and fails badly on the first attempt.

At first Jamie's too busy with labyrinths and man-eating books to think about it. Then, for a wee while, it's funny.

So almost a week passes before he starts getting angry, which is probably why the Doctor looks so gobsmacked when Jamie tracks him down on the thirty-fourth storey of the library and says, "You forgot my face."

"Jamie -"

"I could've been stuck like that forever! Stuck _wrong_."

"But you weren't, so no harm done."

"No harm, he says! You don't even know my face. That -" Jamie points at a book full of foreign squiggles that the Doctor had been reading. "You could probably copy out ten pages of that -"

"Fifty," the Doctor mutters.

"- from memory. But you've never even looked at me properly."

"Really," the Doctor says, with his hands fluttering around as they do when someone troubles him, like it's smoke he's fanning away. "I assure you -"

"Look at me, Doctor." Jamie holds him by the shoulders. The cloth of the Doctor's coat, he notices for the first time, is too slick to be wool, too heavy to be cotton, and altogether strange. Just like the Doctor, it comes from some terribly far-off place.

The Doctor stops fidgeting. And looks. Jamie can tell, though the Doctor's hair shadows his eyes. His blue eyes, a blue like a thousand miles of an alien sky Jamie's never seen. For a second Jamie is very small and very homesick. Then the feeling drifts away, and he stares into the Doctor's funny little creased face, which for once is not smiling, which has folded into something new, like when Victoria learnt to make a crane from a sheet of paper. Jamie knows then that he'd follow the Doctor all the way to the end of the universe. Or farther, because Zoe says the universe doesn't have an end.

He knows that the Doctor wants him to, and doesn't want to want it.

He knows, when the Doctor touches his face, that none of that matters. They've both been taken to bits, rebuilt, and everything's changed already, even if it didn't show 'til now.

"I didn't look," the Doctor says, "because I didn't want to be seen."

Jamie closes his eyes. In the dark, he sees the Doctor's eyes still. "Ya bampot."

The Doctor's hand is spread over Jamie's cheek; he's being looked at in three dimensions. Mostly the Doctor's a restless creature, coming and going as quick as a gypsy, but it feels like he might spend all the time to the end of the universe looking at Jamie, closer and closer. "I'm sorry. For my, er, bampottedness."

Jamie smiles, and opens his eyes, and the Doctor is smiling too. "No harm done."

A kiss, that's next. Jamie feels it on his lips as though it's already happened, almost. But it's the first step on the longest road there's ever been, and for a second he can't move. Until he does, eyes open all the time, thinking _You'll never forget me now._


End file.
